Ruth Pastine, a native of New York now living in California, is set to show new work at Miami Project 2013 via Brian Gross Fine Art. The fair is in its second year. Pastine often uses what appears to be a single color that gradually changes across a painting. “My work is focused on the phenomenological investigation of color and its optical invocation of temperature, light, and spatial interplay. My painting process explores the perceptual interaction of saturated and nuanced color relationships that investigate the dialogue between object, presence, and phenomena. I work with subtle color, that which is difficult not just to describe but to see, as a vehicle to transcend preconceptions about perception to redefine the perceptual field,” says Pastine. “Color is a vehicle to engage the ever-present moment of discovery through my process, what Hegel called the 'universality' of the here-and-now, and avail this opportunity to the viewer. Color is present tense, as it exists in the moment of perception, which has the potential to free us from the burden of what we think we know to be available to experience the unknown.” Pastine also creates installations with series of her work. There is something added to each piece as it is shown next to her other paintings. Her works are often similar; they are part of a series (she uses “seriality” in her body of work”). “My process is invested in the methodological repetition of working serially. Seriality is a means to exhaust and expand upon the set limitations of a given body of work. It's fascinating that the finite color systems and structural parameters of one series become the limitless potential to advance new work and open doors to a completely different series with new defining parameters” she says. “The works in a given series have an exclusive dialogue and relationship to one another through color, structure, and spatial interplay, but stand as individual pieces afforded by the finitude of the singular canvas and the self-referentiality of the square and the rectangle. I also work on multiple panel paintings: diptychs, triptychs, and quartets that are sited as fixed installations, and I have created site-specific installations that speak to the dynamics of the architecture and social context. These pieces present complex perceptual experiences and relationships between the paintings and the space they occupy.”

Pastine also creates works on paper that are smaller in scale and are more “immediate” when it comes to the creative process. “Although both my oil-on-canvas paintings and pastel works on paper are built up with numerous layers, the dry pastel pigment medium demands a completely different application, and reintroduced perceptual edges between hue, value, and saturation separations in the work, due to the actual limitations of the dry pigments,” says Pastine. “Limitations present the opportunity to advance my process. In the new paintings the perceptual edges between color, value, and saturation heighten the dialectical process and the complex interplay between materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, light and space, surface and depth, the tangible and the ineffable. I embrace limitations as the vehicle to transcend those same limitations. Paradoxically, it presents the finite and the infinite simultaneously.” What is it Pastine wants her audience (i.e. YOU) to get out of her work? “My hope is that the work shares the ever-present moment of discovery with the viewer, the immediacy of my process, and the anxiety and awe that engages me in the studio, what Kant and Hegel refer to as the sublime, which requires the presence of something terrifying and beautiful. “ she says. Pastine is bringing several new paintings and pastel works on paper to Miami. The works are from her Interplay series, 2013. These new works were just completed. “… it's always deeply gratifying to share the new work with a new audience and have it dynamically in play.” says Pastine.